Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.

But the hour has chimed. He is coming; I am leaving.

the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.”

So where is the country of the Tsar of Death? Where is the nation of the Tsar of Life? They are not so easy to find, yet each day you step upon both one hundred times or more. Every portion of earth is infinitely divided between them, to the smallest unit of measure, and smaller yet.

“War is not for winning, Masha,” sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. “It is for surviving.”

We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts.

My death is not so diffuse. I have only one. You have millions.

There Are No Firebirds in Leningrad

What else didn’t she know? Everything, everything.

Everything kept occurring all at once, each thing on top of the last. Was she happy? Did she think of Koschei? She thought of mushrooms, and vinegar, and old wounds.

There is only one question: Who is to rule? And that is never answered with words.

On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes.

It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

choosing is hard—one choice is never the end of the story.

Wicked creatures never stay away for long, she said.

That’s why they keep telling this story. It’s the only story.

“And on my life I would never suggest to you that stories cannot be forgotten in the bone even when a brother or a wizard or a rifle says you must, you must forget, it never happened; there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”